


Dust

by zacharybosch



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Basically, Louisiana, M/M, Messy Feelings, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, accepting more appropriate tag suggestions in the comments thx, angsty road trip, but maybe slightly less sad at the end?, dealing with feelings inappropriately, i don't know wtf i'm doing with these tags, i honestly don't know, it's pretty sad, murder is not a good way to talk to each other, swampy cabin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 05:50:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8151254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zacharybosch/pseuds/zacharybosch
Summary: Hannibal had shattered the teacup when he gutted Will and slit Abigail’s throat. Will had shattered it further when he rejected Hannibal in the weak winter light of his home in Wolf Trap. Now they shattered together, and Will thought they must be a fine dust by now, so many times had the pieces been broken. Perhaps they would just blow away in the wind.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i had the idea for this fic ages ago, wrote it down, and promptly forgot about it. then the [big bang](http://nbchannibalbigbang.tumblr.com/) was announced and i suddenly remembered it, signed up, then sort of forgot about it again. submitted a draft one day before the deadline. then forgot some more. then wrote the whole damn thing a couple days before the last deadline for posting. i am a bad person.
> 
> artwork by my partner [bashfulwerewolf](http://bashfulwerewolf.tumblr.com/) is still in progress, but i will update when it's done!

Will had been the one to pull them from the waves, to haul their broken bodies up the winding cliff path and back along the road to the house on the bluff. It had seemed the natural and right thing to do, to save Hannibal and himself, just as murdering Dolarhyde had; just as plunging them off the cliff in the first place had also been natural and right.

Hannibal had shattered the teacup when he gutted Will and slit Abigail’s throat. Will had shattered it further when he rejected Hannibal in the weak winter light of his home in Wolf Trap. Now they shattered together, and Will thought they must be a fine dust by now, so many times had the pieces been broken. Perhaps they would just blow away in the wind.

Hannibal was in an out of consciousness, weeks of healing condensed down into a few snatches of sound or smell or sight: moonlight reflecting off the wet beach, and Will’s voice ringing in his ears; the stark outline of Chiyoh’s rifle cutting through harsh fluorescent light, and an antiseptic sting in the air; midnight roads flitting past a car window; hushed arguments from the other side of a wall; Will’s face, newly healed but bearing the marks of hurt.

His first truly lucid day, fever broken and pain down to only a dull throb, was the day Will left the house for good. Hannibal had risen from his bed, walked slowly from room to room, took great lungfuls of air but found neither sight nor smell of the man he was looking for. The only sign that Will had ever been there at all was the heap of blood-stained, salt-soaked clothes on the bedroom floor. Chiyoh had entered then, looked disapprovingly at Hannibal as he ran his fingers over the stained cloth.

“He refused to get rid of them. Wouldn’t wash them. Wouldn’t let me do it.”

“Where are mine?” Hannibal’s voice was cracked and rough. Too long since last he’d spoken. What were the last words he’d said? _This is all I ever wanted for you, Will. For both of us._

“He took them.”

It had been a simple matter after that. Hannibal would hunt, and Chiyoh would not try to stop him, though she warned him off the idea many times.

As once Will had done, so Hannibal would do; he would find him, and forgive him, in one way or another.

***

Hannibal drives.

Two years he has been on the road. More than that, probably, but the passage of time has been hazy of late. He thinks of pilgrims, martyrs, and holy crusaders. At any given moment he is one and all of these things; but mostly, he is adrift. His passenger is a crumpled shirt, stiff with blood and sea salt. The ocean follows him down poorly-lit city backstreets to the howling emptiness of lonely highways. The memory of fingers clutch at him and something bright and hot settles behind his eyes, and he clutches at the shirt in turn. He looks upon it as a beacon that will light his way, and he scents it as a bloodhound that will find its quarry, and he holds it as a talisman that will lead him home.

He travels coast-to-coast, back and forth. Sometimes it’s a carefully planned route he thinks will find him his prize; most of the time it’s the haphazard wandering of a man who knows only that he needs to _find,_ but not _what_ or _how_ or _why._ His travels bring him, as he knew they should’ve done long before now, to Louisiana. And he finds, as he knew he would, the first small glimmer of hope. He hears the story in Shreveport; someone had a cousin down in Lockport who got beaten and choked to death, body washed up three weeks later and thirteen miles away, pulled by the sluggish waters of Bayou Lafourche and half-eaten by gators.

He follows the dust of a thread of a trail, painting tyre-tracks down the I-49, and he hears little enough in Alexandria. Less still in Lafayette. The shirt sits twisted in his fist, mocking him, and he’s nearly given up hope when he comes eventually to Lockport, expecting to find another taunting dead end. But he arrives, and he puts his ear to the ground, and he listens.

The body was washed up in Larose, but it took a particularly long time to place its origin in Lockport. Larose had had its own people killed, taken and beaten and strangled and dumped, and they thought this was another of theirs.

Or it could’ve been from Cut Off, three miles down the road. They’d had people dying too. He spends a few days in each town, holing up in sticky motels and fanning the flame behind his eyes with more stories of beaten bodies and the salt scent of the sea.

And when he’s heard all he can, Hannibal drives.

More dead people in Galliano, though not as many as the other towns further up the road. Golden Meadow has remained untouched. Bayou Lafourche flows slow and dogged to his left, marshy grassland spreads endless to his right, as he trails down to Leeville. Then further, taking the raised expressway all the way to Port Fourchon. He sees spindly roads splaying out beneath him, concrete veins snaking their way along slivers of semi-solid ground, lazy waves lapping at the grass-tufted edges. The whole place seems fragile, held together by a spider’s thread, as if one stiff breath could make it all simply disconnect and float out to into the gulf.

In Port Fourchon he finds houses on stilts with brightly-coloured roofs, and another corpse, this one fresh. Not dumped in the swamp, but laid out in the grasses, audience to the cacophony of gold-winged summer cicadas. He lingers for a week, far longer than he should, but it’s clear enough now where he needs to go and he’s unsure what will happen when he arrives at the end of his hunt.

He points his car back along the road towards Golden Meadow, and Hannibal drives. 

It’s mundane really, the way it happens, as if they were childhood friends who had fallen out of contact over the years. Hannibal is walking across the parking lot of a supermarket when suddenly Will is before him, weighed down with too many shopping bags and muttering at the ground. He’d imagined a lot of different scenarios for their reunion, had even recklessly returned to the clifftop house on the first anniversary of their murder of Dolarhyde to see if Will was there waiting for him. Will hadn’t been there, of course. Nor had he been there on the second anniversary.

But a chance encounter in a parking lot was not something that had ever entered Hannibal’s mind. When he thought of Will, he thought of the chase, of the push and pull they’d been entwined in since their first meeting, breath after heavy breath caught in an endless feedback loop. He thought of being free, extricating themselves from the clutches of the other, whether by chance or calculated intention.

Hannibal never thought of silence, and weary eyes staring back at him. He lets out a long breath, and the accumulated mental detritus of two years’ dogged searching leaves with it. It’s obvious now, looking at Will, that killing him was never an option. This would not be another Florentine mess.

Will gives a slight nod, and Hannibal falls into step beside him. Wordlessly, he takes one of the shopping bags, and the clumsy jamming of their fingers together as the bag is transferred is not what Hannibal ever imagined either. But the fire licks across his skin all the same, and he wonders how he managed the last two years with only Will’s blood- and salt-stiff shirt to cling to.

They walk, not far, and come to a battered motorboat tied to a pier. Will loads his bags in and Hannibal does the same, moving slowly in the heat of the afternoon.

Will sails them out along narrow, sluggish channels, always silent, always staring straight ahead. Hannibal watches the smooth, shallow waves ripple out from the boat. He watches tendrils of spanish moss trailing in the water like hair. He watches Will, and Will watches their course.

***

In his one-room cabin, they sit apart. Will on the narrow bed, Hannibal on the only chair. Hannibal has spoken, at length, of his life on the road and what lead him here. He asked, more than once, about the murders, but nothing he says provokes more than a blink, or a sigh. He has one part yet unspoken.

“I have loved you, in my own way, endlessly.”

Will keeps his silence. Lets the weight of Hannibal’s words sink in, and he knows them to be true.

“Speak to me, Will. Please.”

It’s hard to deny Hannibal, even now. He moves, reaches across his bed to retrieve something jammed down in the corner by the wall. Hannibal’s sweater, blood-dark and salt-stiff, suffused with two years of late night whispers in the dark. Will holds it tight in his hands, looks down at it as he speaks. 

“I kept telling myself that I had every intention of disappearing down here. That I would spin my days out in the swamp until time or violence took me... but I wanted you to find me. I wanted you to force my hand to action. I wanted… I can’t help but hurt myself again and again. I wanted to hurt. I ran away because I wanted it to hurt. I let you find me, because I wanted it to hurt. It was all that felt real to me.”

“You speak in the past. What do you want _now?_ ” Hannibal hates how desperate he sounds, hates the barely-there twitch of his fingers as he stops himself from reaching out, but he knows he would live out this shameful display a thousand times over if Will was there to witness it.

Will does look at him then, sees the years of the hunt writ heavily on his face and for one long, furious moment, he is angry that Hannibal did what Will wanted of him, that he came and found him and was now forcing his hand to action. So long as Hannibal stayed away, Will could exist in an unreality where he made no choices and his desires had no consequences. But now Hannibal is here at the event horizon with him, and Will is guiding him with one hand and pushing him back with the other.

Two forceful strides from the bed to Hannibal’s chair, and Will throws a solid punch. Up until this moment, Will had seemed weighed down under a build-up of dust, limbs heavy and head bowed, but in the seconds before the pain spreads through Hannibal’s jaw he sees fire and fury and life and he thinks, _there you are, I found you._ Hannibal’s lip blooms and splits red, but he doesn’t miss a beat, just gets up and pushes against Will and kisses him, hard and desperate and passionate and _alive._

And Will kisses back. He digs his fingers into Hannibal’s shoulders and clutches at his face and pulls at his hair and he kisses back.

Hannibal fists his hands in Will’s shirt, an unconscious echo of the night on the bluff, but he doesn’t shy away from pulling Will flush against him this time. He drives Will backwards to the bed, and Will lets himself fall without question.

Hannibal is already nestled between Will’s legs, sucking wet kisses to the column of his neck, when he thinks to ask.

“You ran away from me in order to hurt yourself. Is this just another form of punishment? Letting yourself be ravaged and ruined by the monster you abhor. Are these the just deserts for your transgressions?”

Will is breathless, pulling Hannibal in closer with grasping hands and legs curled around his hips. “I don’t abhor you.” He pulls harder, grasps tighter, breathes faster. “Just do it.”

“Will--”

“Do it. Do me like you did in your kitchen. Make me pay for what I did.”

“Will!” Hannibal shoves violently at Will’s chest and removes himself to the far end of the bed. “Enough. I’ve no interest in enabling your penance. You’ve nothing to repent for.”

“But I ran from you. I tried to kill you. I rejected you. I betrayed you. I let you love me. I let you...” Will gasps a sobbing breath. Hannibal holds himself very still. “I let you think that I loved you.”

“And I gutted you. I murdered our daughter. I murdered your friend and colleague. I let your sickness fester and I put you in jail. I sent a killer after your family. Consider that your punishment. If there is a debt, it has been paid many times over.”

Will’s face softens by slow degrees, not completely, but enough. Hannibal reaches a hesitant hand towards him, and Will grasps it, and pulls.

“I let you think that I loved you… and I let myself think that I didn’t.”

“It’s done. It’s over.”

“Promise me you’ll follow me. Wherever I go, whatever happens, promise you’ll be right there behind me. Don’t leave me alone in the dark.” Will paws helplessly at Hannibal’s chest as another sob heaves in his chest. “Find me. Bring me back.”

“I’ve always found you, Will.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

The night is spent conjoined. Hannibal traces his fingers again and again over the scar on Will’s abdomen, _his_ scar, in tender embrace and frenzied, fevered coupling. Wet skin slaps against skin like waves breaking on rocks and Will opens himself up like he wants Hannibal to drown in him, pulls and pulls to get Hannibal nearer, deeper, harder, _inside._ When Hannibal does as he is bid and buries himself as deep as he can go, and Will arches and shatters into a hundred thousand motes of dust, it seems for a moment that the years and miles stretch backward and forward in time until the place of their joining is the only place that has ever existed.

In the small hours of the morning, the first pale fingers of light skim across the waters of the bayou to colour the curtains of spanish moss hanging low over the window of Will’s cabin. Inside, the faintest dappling on Hannibal’s skin as he stirs, and rouses, and wakens fully to find himself alone, the space next to him in the bed long since cold.

He remembers Will’s words of the night before, _follow me, find me, bring me back,_ and he gathers his things.

**Author's Note:**

> come yell with me on [tumblr](http://zacharybosch.tumblr.com)!


End file.
